Live data from Hacker News

Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

wikimediafoundation.org

141–150 of 204 posts

Re: Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

#141
post #6

The big websites participating in the blackout like Wikipedia or some porn sites do have vast access to eyeballs across europe, and would be affected directly and adversely by the new rules. As the lobbying fight has already been mostly won by the local publisher industry, they use their access to those eyeballs to fuel democratic protests of the rule. I hope they win and that Article 11 and 13 will be removed. I thi…

I don't think it's democratic at all. In case of my small country, almost literally no one wants this law - but that doesn't matter, we're a small country. The whole thing feels terribly wrong - 10 million people, the 100% majority of this rather big geographical location that is even separated by mountains on all sides, are just overruled, while they don't even understand the language these politicians are talking i…

I don't think the Art 13 legislation will last in its current form. But whatever form it does take, if your country was "independent", I wouldn't be surprised if it signed up to harmonize anyway as part of a trade deal.

Your real enemy is globalization and modern conveniences of globally cheap goods, and globally high quality goods being available for you to purchase and manufacture and export. The alternatives are somewhere on a sliding scale between Norway / Switzerland to North Korea. The closer you are geographically to Europe, the more you'd need to be like North Korea to maintain the kind of independence you think you want, because the game theoretics of inter-nation competition demand that competitors follow international rules.

Re: Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

#142
post #22

As an EU citizen, I hope large portions of the internet will just block us. A couple of days without YouTube, Wikipedia and other services would create sufficient outrage to put pressure on the EU for introducing these idiotic laws. I mean, GDPR is bad enough for start ups, but Article 13?

GDPR and Article 13 (in The Directive on Copyright) are totally different and unrelated things. I happen to be a small business owner in the EU and I have many customers who are the same. We all have registered with the ICO (UK) for something like £60 pa and filled in a short questionnaire. We have read the clear guidance on what records to keep and what to not keep - it's not rocket science. That is GDPR for most sm…

> In the end, are you really sure you want the world to block us?

Well this is a double edge sword. EU still produces something like 20% of the global GDP and if a company can ignore such a market than let it be. There will be many alternative projects spawn to fill the market need (if there is a real one, not talking about surveillance capitalism products here). Is this that bad for the EU? I don't think so.

Re: Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

#143
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright is a dinosaur of an idea that belongs in the annals of history and out of the present. Then don't copyright the content you make, just release it out into the public domain. Be the change you want to see. But let's be honest, the people most vocal against Article 13 are those who want to leech other people's creations for free. Not those people actually creating the content.

In the EU you can't easily release content into the public domain, in Germany it's impossible to do that.

What's more, since there is only one collecting society for each type of media (which is always the case afaik), German law allows the collecting society to just assume that all works in existence are made by their members.

When someone plays music at an event, the collecting society will try to collect royalties from them, even if it's just CC or public-domain music, and the organiser is guilty until proven innocent.

Re: Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the "user content" part. If I anonymously upload copyrighted material to YouTube, I can sue YouTube. Same with Reddit, Facebook, Steam, Kongregate, Pinterest, Imgur, Instagram, ... . I'm building a platform where anyone can make a game and share it. If someone names his game "Zelda" or "Tetris", I can get sued. If my competitor uploads his own material to my site, they can sue me. Theses platforms sho…

If the user is anonymous, so as copyright holder, or target of harassment or whatever I can't know who is the creator of the content, it makes perfectly sense for me that you, as host of the content are liable of the content itself. I don't see anything strange about it.

The problem is that the new law punishes the platform for hosting the content even when they didn't know they were hosting it. This creates a chilling effect, as they will need to review and block preventatively any dubious content.

Previously it was enough that they removed the content when they were notified about it; this didn't create such huge chilling effect for most content.

Re: Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

#145
post #21

As an EU citizen, I hope large portions of the internet will just block us. A couple of days without YouTube, Wikipedia and other services would create sufficient outrage to put pressure on the EU for introducing these idiotic laws. I mean, GDPR is bad enough for start ups, but Article 13?

my 2 cents: A few days of outrage will do absolutely nothing to stop or change the law. AFAICT, many the EU bureaucrats and politicians fervently believe that they are doing the right thing here, even if it's clearly bonkers. It's like Brexit that way. Also: as said elsewhere, article 13 is probably all good news for YouTube, so I doubt that they do anything deeply confrontational. Plus, even if they did, they would…

> as said elsewhere, article 13 is probably all good news for YouTube

This part is not clear to me. On one hand they are big enough to prevent copyrighted material being published. They could also offer filtering services to smaller parties.

But on the other hand, YouTube is still full of copyrighted material. You can find basically any videoclip, cd-rip, or anything else on there. There are even entire movie rips on there, that regularly get deleted. Do they currently pay some big license owner a fee for this? I don't think so (but I'm not sure).

So if this article 13 passes, YouTube will have to remove all of this material. Not only that, but they have to prevent such material being published in the first place. Or somehow make sure that a certain videoclip/cd-rip is payed off to the proper license owner.

I'm not sure if it's even possible for YouTube to make such a filter, without having either a lot of false negatives or positives.

Re: Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the "user content" part. If I anonymously upload copyrighted material to YouTube, I can sue YouTube. Same with Reddit, Facebook, Steam, Kongregate, Pinterest, Imgur, Instagram, ... . I'm building a platform where anyone can make a game and share it. If someone names his game "Zelda" or "Tetris", I can get sued. If my competitor uploads his own material to my site, they can sue me. Theses platforms sho…

If the user is anonymous, so as copyright holder, or target of harassment or whatever I can't know who is the creator of the content, it makes perfectly sense for me that you, as host of the content are liable of the content itself. I don't see anything strange about it.

It means that what you are doing now, posting a comment using a throwaway, will be impossible.

As no public platform will take this risk and users don't want to pay the extra money the platform needs to build or buy the impossible content filters it would need.

Re: Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

#147

Here are part of the lyrics of "Enter Sandman" of Metallica: Exit light Enter night Take my hand We're off to Never—, Neverland Now I lay me down to sleep Pray the Lord my soul to keep If I die before I wake Pray the Lord my soul to take YCombinator is now in violation of article 13. Some filter should have prevented me from posting this. That is what article 13 is about.

Article 13 is bad enough without needing to make up absurd interpretations of it. EU law is enforced on the basis of proportionality, and the wording of the proposed directive already covers that.

There's never going to be some legal obligation to remove something like the quote you just posted.

Furthermore, since it's a directive each member state will need to implement it in a way that's compatible with both the directive and its own laws. The countries in the EU all have some sort of concept that's analogous to "fair use", even if that's not what they call it.

Re: Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

#148
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider the difference "making content providers liable for the content they publish" vs "making platforms liable for the content others publish".

Yes, but currently content providers are making money (not in case of wikipedia, I know) over content that could be against the law (it could be hate speech, harassment, copyright infringement or whatever). For example how are online content providers any difference from traditional newspapers, where the director is accountable for all content published in the newspaper?

If content providers in the online medium are to be the same to traditional providers like newspapers internet as we know it won't be any longer and we will have just that, online traditional newspapers.

Making money by breaking the law should not be allowed I agree. But currently these laws (copyright) are more due for a refactoring than the medium (internet) itself. As these laws are not well balanced between all parties involved, especially with all the possibilities in the current age.

Re: Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

#149

The interesting part was while not the whole EU does the protest? It would send a clearer message.

AFAIK my country's EU representatives are against, so Wikipedia in the Netherlands might not see a need as rallying citizens doesn't change a thing without a clear call to action.

Re: Four Wikipedias to ‘Black Out’ over EU Copyright Directive

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the "user content" part. If I anonymously upload copyrighted material to YouTube, I can sue YouTube. Same with Reddit, Facebook, Steam, Kongregate, Pinterest, Imgur, Instagram, ... . I'm building a platform where anyone can make a game and share it. If someone names his game "Zelda" or "Tetris", I can get sued. If my competitor uploads his own material to my site, they can sue me. Theses platforms sho…

If the user is anonymous, so as copyright holder, or target of harassment or whatever I can't know who is the creator of the content, it makes perfectly sense for me that you, as host of the content are liable of the content itself. I don't see anything strange about it.

You own small a grocery store, and as an altruistic service to the community you provide a public bulletin board at the store entrance. Town residents can use this to share public messages and advertisements. Someone with no relation to you anonymously pins a poster with copyrighted images to the bulletin board at the entrance.

You originally had no idea the images were not the property of the creator of the poster (how could you?), but as soon as you are made aware of the problem you remove the poster in a timely manner.

Does it make perfect sense to you that I (owner of the images) can now successfully sue you (the owner of the store and provider of the bulletin board service) for copyright infringement, and have you pay damages to me as compensation for the time the poster was visible at the bulletin board?

More importantly, do you think making the store owner vulnerable to litigation is 1. in line with how similar laws usually work? 2. a fair administration of justice? 3. a net benefit to the town and society at large?

Post reply on HN